Gromkyan scanned the instruments carefully, checking each one in turn. At seventeen thousand feet they broke through the cloud into the rich orange sky. The winter sun, a weak red ball, hung only a short distance above them. In one hour it would be almost dark. In sixty-five minutes they would be south of Riga, and in a further hour and a quarter they would be over Heligoland. There they would turn a few degrees to the left, cross the North Sea and fly over Clacton VOR and into London. It would be five in the afternoon local time when they arrived, and they should be in their Embassy quarters by six thirty. Gromkyan wondered whether Botnick was laying on the party in the Embassy, or whether they would be going out. He hoped they would be going out; he liked the atmosphere of London at night, even on a Sunday.

Behind the crew in the cockpit was a bullet-proof door which could only be opened from inside the cockpit – an anti-hijacking measure. On the other side of that door, one hundred and fifty passengers, including the deputy chief of the KGB, several Russian diplomats – including one KGB and two GRU agents – two English diplomats, a group of Russian buyers of agricultural machinery, twelve Englishmen in the overcoat-manufacturing industry, a Welsh university lecturer and his wife returning from their honeymoon, and a motley group of tourists and businessmen, together with the standard Aeroflot plain-clothed armed guard, were beginning to relax. They had survived take-off; they now had to survive only the service and the landing.

I stood outside the boundary of Heathrow, near a maintenance-area entrance. It was the kind of afternoon that makes organizers of garden fêtes hang themselves from marquee guy-ropes. It was filthy wet, and a continuous, thick spray of rain drove down, which was whipped into every pore on my face by a wind that blew solidly and strongly, without pausing to gust. It was exactly the sort of afternoon I had been praying for. It was five o’clock and nearly dark, and I knew nobody would want to know anything except getting his body inside a dry hot room and getting a cup of wet hot tea inside his body.